The 1910s were Danish cinema’s Golden Age. In this decade Denmark produced an explosion of erotic melodramas for international export, the first films written by Carl Theodor Dreyer, and movies featuring cinema’s first superstar, Asta Nielsen. The first Danish film to make an international splash … [Read more...] about Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages
Harbor Drift
The worldwide call for the proletariat to lose its collective chains was answered not just by the Russian people. The German communists, too, shed blood on their country’s streets and scaffolds, mostly the highly politicized vanguard, fighting for ideals and bread on behalf of workers too deeply … [Read more...] about Harbor Drift
The Half-Breed
“Lo, the poor Indian,” wrote Alexander Pope in 1733, “whose untutor’d mind/sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind.” Thus begins the poet’s famous contribution to the 17th century notion of the Noble Savage, a creature of the European enlightenment who is at once inferior and superior to the … [Read more...] about The Half-Breed
Hal Roach: King of Comedy, 1924 – 1929
FAST COMPANY (1924) Directed by Robert F. McGowan, Charles Parrot (Charley Chase, uncredited) Cast Mickey Daniels, Walter Wilkinson, Allen “Farina” Hoskins, Jack Davis, Jackie Condon, Joe Cobb, Ernest “Sunshine Sammy” Morrison, Mary Kornman Production Hal E. Roach Studios JUST A GOOD GUY … [Read more...] about Hal Roach: King of Comedy, 1924 – 1929
The Grim Game
An inspired, indefatigable, and shameless self-promoter and, not coincidentally, one of the most famous people in the world in the early decades of the twentieth century, Harry Houdini was a natural for the movies. Both he and the new medium trafficked in illusions. Sometimes that worked in … [Read more...] about The Grim Game
Gribiche
Article condensed from the notes accompanying Flicker Alley’s release of French Masterworks: Russian Émigrés in Paris (1923–1929). Belgian-born director Jacques Feyder became an overnight sensation with L’Atlantide, his film of Pierre Benoit’s postwar escapist bestseller about the mythical … [Read more...] about Gribiche
Gretchen the Greenhorn
Also presented in this program: Original coming attraction trailers from the lost films The Patriot (1928), directed by Ernst Lubitsch and starring Emil Jannings, which won the 1929 Academy Award for Best Screenplay; Beau Sabreur (1928), which starred Gary Cooper, a sequel to the 1927 version … [Read more...] about Gretchen the Greenhorn
Greed
"In an era devoted to escapism and the happy ending," writes film historian Kevin Brownlow, "Stroheim's obsession with realism must have seemed insane." The director abandoned the studio to shoot on the actual locations evoked in Frank Norris's novel McTeague, so that Greed, among many other things, … [Read more...] about Greed